Decrepit Birth – Axis Mundi (Review)

Decrepit Birth are a death metal band from the US and this is their fourth album.

This is death metal that fuses together a heavy and brutal approach in its delivery with both technical and progressive aspects, resulting in a well-rounded slab of extremity that just seems to get better and better the more you listen and absorb its engaging content.

This is an album of intelligent brutality. Well-crafted and obviously written with consideration and a deep control on all of the various aspects of the music, this is technical death metal with progressive tendencies, using both styles to fashion a ripping death metal album.

The main emphasis is firmly on providing brutal music that exists in a framework somewhere between timeless death metal and a more progressive version of this. Enhanced by technical wizardry and some melodic elements, (melody is used, but not overly so), it means that the tracks on Axis Mundi offer the listener a lot to get their teeth into.

Each song is an extremely satisfying exemplar of quality, interesting death metal. There’s more than enough requisite speed and aggression here to keep any fan of the style happy, but when you enhance this core delivery with technical riffs, progressive structures, cutting melodies, fluid solos, and other such things, you actually get and album by a band that, amazingly, doesn’t overly sound like anyone else other than themselves. Quite the achievement, really.

With a crisp, clean, punchy production, this album has the sonic muscles necessary to back up its meaty material. The actual album itself lasts just under 45 minutes in length, but if you’re lucky enough to get hold of a version with the bonus tracks, you will also get an extra 20 minutes worth of cover songs by Metallica, Sepultura, and Suffocation – well worth it.

Axis Mundi takes elements of both old and new versions of the death metal genre to deliver quality, enjoyable songs that will make your head spin.